When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression.
It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.
Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex.
We might be at that point with repainted statues. Museum visitors are now starting to expect the ugly garish colours.
They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
I could imagine there's some great videos out there? I'd be keen to have scientific basis given rather than speculative artwork.
No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts.
A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
You generally can't hold someone responsible for what someone else says about them.
You can do both: prove the base case and reach across the aisle to the art college next door to see if someone is interested in the follow up "creative exercise". You can present both "here's what we can prove" and "here's an extrapolation by a skilled artist of what additional layering/contouring might have done".
Likewise archeologists will classify finds as tools when they don't have nearly enough knowledge about the craft in question to be able to do this properly (see the extensive mis-classification of weaving swords/beaters as weapons [0], but there are many other cases).
So I'm a little reluctant to cut them some slack and say "this is how scholarship" works when they get all petulant about including colours that we know the ancients had, in ways we know they used them, for this kind of reconstruction.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/67863215/Weapon_or_Weaving_Swords_a...